UNIX Turns 40

40 Years of long journey that began with Ken Thompson of Bell lab writing the first version of operating system in assembly language for a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer, this happened in Aug 1969. he spend one week each on the operating system, a shell, an editor and an assembler. In 1970 the operating system was named Unics, for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service and a pun on "emasculated Multics." (The name was later mysteriously changed to Unix.)

In 1983 ACM gave Thompson and Ritchie its top prize, the A.M. Turing Award for contributions to IT: "The model of the Unix system has led a generation of software designers to new ways of thinking about programming."

Programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are most often credited with the invention of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969 and the early 1970s. That's entirely fair, but as with most important technologies, it's the people who follow the pioneers who often make the difference between a fabulous lab prototype and a technology that really transforms the landscape.

These three people have made a difference in the Unix world

1. David Korn, builder of tools : The Bourne shell written by Steve Bourne at Bell Labs and the C shell written by Bill Joy at Berkeley, Korn added his own ideas and turned them into a more general scripting language. The result was a high-level programming language that became the de facto standard for Unix and Unix-like systems.Then, about 10 years ago, Korn wrote Uwin (Unix for Windows), a Posix-based interface for Windows that allows AT&T's Unix-based code to run on Windows computers. Before Korn wrote Uwin, a programmer couldn't mix Unix and Windows calls in one integrated application.
   
   
2. Rick Rashid, mucking with Unix: Now head of Microsoft Research, Rashid was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983 when he began work on Mach, a Unix-based message-passing operating system for multiprocessing applications. Mach was built on a BSD version of Unix; it was a "microkernel" that replaced the BSD kernel. The Mach employed a machine-independent memory management system so it could be targeted at many different types of computers and computing -- uniprocessors, multiprocessors and distributed processors.It spawned a variety of other efforts where operating systems were effectively layered on top of smaller, simpler systems.

3. Gordon Bell, from the bully pulpit: He spent 23 years in R&D at Digital Equipment Corp., where he most famously led the development of the Vax, the most successful minicomputer ever built. He went on to co-found Encore Computer, whose parallel-processing machines ran Berkeley Unix, and then Ardent Computer, whose graphics super-workstations ran AT&T Unix. Bell's enthusiasm for Unix was matched only by his disdain for the commercial vendors of the operating system's variants